My Way Home (St.Gabriel Series Book 1) (St. Gabriel Series) (18 page)

“Cammy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel as though you had done something wrong. You haven’t. I’m the one that has.”

Race set down the book he was holding and came to me, slid his hand behind my head, and kissed my neck. He always kissed my neck after an argument, it meant it was over.

The Heart

Reconciliation is plagued with doubt. When two people spend years of their lives together in a marriage, and then they are estranged from each other for a time, that time apart is a huge question mark. And when another person is involved, that person is another huge question mark. How could Race be happy with me, want me when he could have someone like Sarah Burns?

I had never been the insecure type, but I found myself needing Race to reassure me often, which he tried to do. If he was gone longer than he said he would be, I wanted to know why. If Race wore a piece of clothing that I didn’t recognize, I wanted to know if she had bought it for him.

“No, anything she bought for me I didn’t keep.”

At moments, too many moments, my imagination ran rampant and I was the absolute worst version of myself. But then there were the phone calls and hang-ups, which were not my imagination. Caller I.D. didn’t help. They were always unidentified calls—I answered them anyway. I was ready for another confrontation.

Those calls happened a lot at first. I still believe it was her calling, although if it was, she never once said anything, even when Race answered. I felt a huge sense of being intruded upon.

I checked to see if Race had her phone number programmed into his phone. He didn’t. I was snooping, which was part of being the worst version of myself. At times, I felt like a complete lunatic.

Reconciliation is also like having to backpedal up a hill. The train that was speeding out of control had stopped, and people wanted to know why. Just as I didn’t want to talk to anyone about why Race had left me, it felt too personal to talk about why he came back—at first anyway.

I was aware of the looks and the whispers. I knew there were people who saw me as a pathetic dumped wife, a woman with such little self-respect that she took back the husband that had cheated on her.

Some good things grew out of that awareness. My brush with divorce eventually brought me to a place where I didn’t care what people thought about me, or that people knew my life wasn’t perfect. And when you admit your life isn’t perfect, it sinks in that it’s unlikely that anyone else’s is either—it’s quite freeing. Over time, I no longer had any difficulty talking about the bumps and bruises in my life.

I realize that if someone has never faced the end of a marriage, they couldn’t possibly understand how life-altering even the possibility of it is. So I don’t fault people for not understanding my choice. The more trials people have in life, the more they understand the complexities of life. I don’t like the trials, but I’m grateful to be on this side of some understanding.

To understand why couples reconcile after infidelity, I think you have to consider the big picture. Losing a marriage is more than losing a spouse, it’s losing a family and a life, and it alters not just your life and your children’s lives, but it affects all those close to your marriage. It devastates parents, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews and friends.

It also can bring the end of so many relationships, which actually are no big loss once you get over the blow. If someone you love and trust doesn’t stick by you through thick and thin, they were not who you thought they were, and you didn’t mean to them what you thought you did, so move on, but I digress.

It’s said that betrayal and divorce are more devastating than the death of a spouse, and I agree. When a spouse dies, I can only imagine the pain of missing that person and the loneliness. I’m sure it’s devastating, even though I haven’t walked in those shoes. Still, I would rather have good thoughts about a husband who died, than have all my memories of our life together tainted by betrayal and rejection.

When a spouse cheats and the marriage ends in divorce, you have to live with not only the loss of your life as you know it, but also with the pain and anger of the betrayal and what it does to your self-worth. And then there’s the ongoing struggle of dealing with the less-than-fond feelings for another human being that’s still walking the earth—it’s so consuming. And if you share children, you may still have to have some interaction with this person—Yuk!

So don’t get me wrong, I think cheating is grounds for kicking some butt out the door. I’ve had friends and family members who ended a marriage because of infidelity and never looked back, and rightfully so, but most of them, even those who had difficult marriages before the affair, were crushed through the process and some have been crushed ever since.

Back to my decision to reconcile with my husband who cheated on me. By the time Race came to me and wanted to get back together, I had begun to adjust, even recover from the loss of so much that had been most important to me in my life. I was looking forward to my next chapter. My lodge was waiting and I couldn’t wait to be back on St. Gabriel.

The breakup of our family, however, I was not recovering from—I don’t think I ever would have. But even that wouldn’t have been enough for me to take back a husband who had betrayed me the way Race did.

The clincher was that I was still in love with Race. And this may be difficult to understand, but I still admired so much of who he was. I truly liked him. He’s not perfect, but if I made a list of all of the qualities that I wanted in a husband, I could check them all off in Race’s favor. He’s interesting, smart, passionate, funny, kind and thoughtful. He has a heart of service and has made me so proud of the way he reaches out to help family, friends and the community. He’s financially responsible, he’s fun in a crowd and one-on-one. He’s romantic, a great father, he makes me feel appreciated, protected and safe. He’s a good dancer and a better kisser and one of the most attractive men I’ve ever known. And… for those of you who have delicate sensibilities, don’t read this last item on the list: he’s really attentive, sexy and confident in bed. Enough said.

Once I decided to reconcile with Race, I never looked back. Not that it was easy, it wasn’t, but I never regretted it, which was primarily due to how Race treated me, our marriage and our family once we were back together.

We flew Janie home from school on a weekend. Race took her and me by the hand and sat us down in the living room. He apologized to Janie and again to me, in front of her, for what he had done. Then he called Paul and did the same.

Janie was ecstatic that her mother and father weren’t getting a divorce, but when it hit her that we would both be moving from the only home she’d ever known, I think she felt a little lost. But you could see the moment she pulled herself up by her bootstraps. She has such a generous spirit.

We talked about plans for Janie to come to the island after graduation before she was hired for whatever job she may get. We were making family plans again. Making those plans and taking her back to the airport as a family felt so right. Simple things, just some of many that at one time I took for granted every day.

I tried to explain to Race what life would be like on the island. I showed him dozens of pictures. His eyes widened, shock, fear maybe, when he looked at the ones of the lodge.

“Is this where we’re going to live?” he asked.

I wondered if he was having second thoughts. I laid a picture of the cottage on the hill on top of the pile. “I was thinking we’d live here. From the porch and the upstairs bedroom, you can look out over the water.”

“And you want to open the lodge… and run it like a hotel?”

“Yes, and there’s another cottage we can rent, George is living in the third.”

“The caretaker?”

“Yes.”

“It looks big.” He was looking at the lodge again.

“It is. Ten guestrooms, and there’s a large dining room. I’d eventually like to open a restaurant.”

I want to laugh when I picture what Race’s face looked like as I told him about all of my plans. He was trying to look interested, even excited. He didn’t say any of the things that I was sure were running through his head, the things he would have said before, “Cammy, have you lost your mind?” I thought there was a good chance he was thinking it, but he didn’t say it. He just listened. I think he blamed himself that I had been driven to such madness, so he decided he would go along for the ride as a sort of penance.

When I first met Race, I thought he was one of the most adventurous people I had ever known. He mountain biked, kayaked and hang-glided. After a few years of marriage, I realized he was athletically adventurous, but he liked life to be familiar, predictable.

Race had many of the same questions I did. “How will we get things to the island?”

“Regular U.S. Mail and shipping services, and for big things the delivery dock. It’s less than a mile from the lodge. It was intentionally located away from downtown so it wouldn’t take away from the ambience. It’ll be really convenient for us when our renovation materials are delivered.”

And there were lots of other questions. “Are there electricity and phones?”

“Yes, and, yes, and you should see the neat old phones in the lodge. There’s cell phone reception but it can be spotty and the phone service isn’t connected right now.”

“Is that why it’s so difficult to get in touch with George, the caretaker?”

“Well, partly. He doesn’t have a phone in his cottage. I tried to talk him into letting me have one installed in his place, but he didn’t want it. If I had forced the issue, he probably wouldn’t have answered it anyway.”

“What are the winters like?” There were deep wrinkles in his forehead by now.

I quoted Sara Strauss, “Cold but gorgeous and peaceful.”

“Where do you get food in the winter?”

“There’s a small grocery store and a dairy on the island, but we’ll buy most of our food on the mainland. And we’ll stock up before the winter.”

Was Race imagining us huddling around a little fire, wasting away to nothing, and then being found frozen to death in the spring?

I was the collector in our family. Race had never had much use for material possessions with a few exceptions, his Jeep being one of them. He had it long before I met him. It had seen two new motors and a paint job. He had driven it over mountains and through deserts and valleys.

When Paul and Janie were born, we brought them home from the hospital in Race’s Jeep, and when they were teenagers, Race taught them both to drive in it. It was in that Jeep that he asked me to marry him. So, when he asked with almost disbelief, “There’s no cars, no cars at all?” I knew what he was thinking.

“There are emergency vehicles, but none of the residents have cars, not on the island, but they do drive snowmobiles in the winter.”

“And why are there no cars?”

“Tradition, preservation, quality of life, and cars scare the horses.”

“Hmm.” He nodded and then asked, “The snowmobiles don’t scare the horses?”

“They probably would, but there are not that many horses in the winter. Most are taken off the island and brought back in the spring. Only about five hundred people live on the island in the winter. A few have horses and sleighs but most have snowmobiles, or walk, or ski. We have a sleigh, and it’s beautiful.”

Race forced a smile and repeated, “But no cars.”

“Nope. There’s a garage where we’ll catch the ferry that stores cars on the mainland. We can store your Jeep, and when we leave the island to go shopping in Kipsey, or to do something on the mainland, it will be right there waiting for us.”

Race’s face brightened, a little. After we had the basics out of the way, I tried not to talk incessantly about St. Gabriel and let Race bring it up when he had questions, which he did.

The weekend for the moving sale arrived.
I told Race he could hang out at his parents’ for those three difficult, crazy days, but he insisted he wanted to help.

People were already lined up at six o’clock on Friday morning. When we opened the doors at eight, a steady stream of buyers flowed through the house all day. Saturday was more of the same.

Race had packed two boxes of books to move and then donated three carloads to the college. What was left was arranged on the bookshelves in his study ready to be sold. A time or two during the sale, Race would take one of those books off the shelf and I would see him standing in a corner reading.

When his old leather chair sold, he went upstairs for a while, but soon he came back down and together we watched the things that represented twenty-five plus years of our life being carried out the front door.

Our neighbor Lillian reported for duty with an apron on, and she proceeded to make deals like a trader on the floor of the Stock Exchange.

Race’s dad did his share of dickering, taking it upon himself to raise prices on some items. “Surely you could get a couple more bucks for that toaster,” he said to me when I came up behind him and caught him in the act.

Race’s mom rearranged the merchandise as tables, counters, and shelves emptied, all the while fighting back the tears. Of all the people I left behind in Texas, Anna Coleman would be the person I would miss the most.